Month: March 2017

I’d be lying if I said the highlight of this month was anything other than seeing the glorious Laura Marling perform at the ABC, flanked by her full band. My expectations were extremely high (I’d waited a ridiculously long time to see her, basically 8 years) but somehow she managed to top them, stepping onstage with a billowing white dress and that ethereal voice that held the audience in precious, adoring silence the whole way through. Even the weekend drunks saluted her with respect. She played most of the new album and some favourites from the past, from ‘Sophia’ to ‘Once’ and ‘Rambling Man’. Marling is one of those artists who I truly ‘grew up with’, in the sense that I followed every album as it was released over the last decade; I can pinpoint certain moments of my life in relation to her songs. It’s a beautiful thing. I’m 23 now and she released Once I Was An Eagle at my age. Every day this inspires me to try and do better. Often I fail.

I also had the pleasure of attending the BBC6 Music Festival By Day at Tramway on Sunday, which was really lovely. Father John Misty was resplendent in his usual theatrical, sarcastic glory; Baloji were really fun & great performers; the folk bands were lovely (especially King Kreosote and his endearingly well-handled technical mishaps) and I rather enjoyed a wee chat about the Glasgow label scene between Gideon Coe and Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels.

In March, we were blessed with three full days of actual perfect sunshine. There’s something so striking about a sunny day in Glasgow. You forget for 10 hours that most of your life is lived under greyness and misting rain. I always think of that Frightened Rabbit lyric from ‘Fun Stuff’: “the city was born bright blue today“. It’s a simple line but it carries that sense of wonder, stepping out the door feeling warmth on your skin.

I sat in the park bare-sleeved, reading. The next time I was in work somebody genuinely said I looked tanned. That’s a result, I must say.

(no mention of deadlines please…) => I wrote an essay about memory, technology & the body in Beckett, Ali Smith & Don DeLillo while listening exclusively to Burial and it was sort of a transcendent, spooky experience.

Recently, Tesco finally put up the price of their Everyday Value Milk Chocolate from 30p to 45p. This struck me with the crushing blow of sentiments lost. I have been referring to 30p Chocolate as my lifeline for years. I will likely continue to do so even as its cost creeps inevitably upwards. Will it still be the same object, even if its very ontological condition in my life has shifted alongside its price? Has the signifier been cleaved from the sign? What cruelty is performed by numbers.

I feel like now I must sever my personal connection to this chocolate. It’s no longer the thing it was. The rising price has changed its substance somehow. Do I detect a hint of bitterness through that thin and sugary bite? A hint of bitterness where once the cheapness alone made it extra sweet? Are our senses wired to the market?

I lament to a friend and he says, god, remember when it was 15p? 15p indeed, and we used to buy 15p bottles of 2litre lemonade too. I’d take my £1 pocket money and come out with a veritable feast of cheap delights. 30p cans of energy juice that made your nerves rattle and your heart skip beats, juddering against your chest. In abandoned skateparks, we’d sit on the ramps and down our fizzy juice, watching sunsets bleed over bleak skylines. A certain formula for pleasure was in our blood. An ineloquent mix of sugar and caffeine. The promise of an evening, materialising its risk at the crisp edges of our skin. People cracking boards against concrete. Let’s light cigarettes, finding nourishment in smoke and the rhythm of each other’s breathing.

*

At university the old cheap chocolate made a resurgence in my life. Like most students, exhaustion is often the order of the day. If you put me in the sweets aisle, before row after row of chocolate, my brain will seize up. All those colours, wrappers, brands. I don’t have the wherewithal to choose. Milk or plain? Nut or fruit? Do I splash out for something lush, expansive, indulgent (Toblerone) or take a risk of something saccharine (Cadbury), or a shaken attempt at reaching for what’s on offer? I lust after chocolate-coated brazils, the perfect nirvana of anything Lindt, the kind of dark ecological chocolate (something truffle, fairtrade) I am reminded of when reading Morton’s Dark Ecology.

When paralysed thus, I pick the cheap stuff. It’s never done me wrong. A simple blend of sugar, cocoa butter, whole milk; various fats, masses and emulsifiers. Apparently no E numbers, or traces of artificial flavourings. I am eating the aura of chocolate, its elementary shadow; a taster of what chocolate could be. It fills, momentarily, a gap.

I have taken it to festivals and found it liquidated in the sun. I have bought stacks at once, hoarded it in my desk drawer, waiting for the next essay to raise its ugly head. I have peeled wrappers open on a break at work, three pieces to tide me over another afternoon of serving fish & chips to impatient strangers. I have devoured whole bars at once, seduced by the distracting glow of a screen.

What now? Can I still buy it at 45p?

Is there a choice?

A good person would use this as a turning point from which to go vegan.

I’ll have to work harder for my tips or something.

It’ll never be the same. At 45p it connotes WWII, Lit courses bracketed by historical dates, records I could never afford to buy.

I like a good zero.

I wish they’d at least make the bar fatter, thicker, richer.

Maybe one day I can conjure real illusions: the imaginary object; luxuriant, ersatz, ethereal chocolate.

For the third day in a row, Brian looked down while brushing his teeth and saw a tiny green shoot sprouting out of the drain. Only last night, at 2am no less, he had pulled the little fucker out and thrown it down the toilet.

“Miriam!” he shouted to his wife, who no doubt was still curled in bed. “The tree’s back!”

“Mhmh?” Cursing at her lack of interest, he spat out toothpaste and watched how the white foam flecked the two bright leaves of the shoot. Remnants of raisins and granola showered like rubble around it. He turned on both taps and washed it away, but the shoot remained.

On his commute to work, he noticed something was on fire at the side of the motorway. The flames were big, apocalyptic, and when he opened the passenger window the black stench of burning rubber filled his car. There wasn’t a scrapyard round here; there were no reasons to be burning rubber. This was the fucking countryside, not some rustbelt wasteland.

At the office, he turned in the financial reports that were due at 10am. He sat through a meeting which featured the usual pantomime antics of his boss, the kind of man whose entire career is based on imitating the flamboyance of a Disney character while necking enough coffee and bourbon to seem manically on form at every performance.

“What we are building up to,” he announced, “is the ultimate synergy.” His arms flailed back in grand gesture, nearly knocking over the pie chart drawing his assistant had etched on the flip chart. “Capital merging with capital, a clean abstraction, the upward surge of profit. Think of this as MarioKart. How many of you have played MarioKart?” His eyes narrowed as he surveyed his colleagues round the table.

There was much quivering, as only a handful of people raised their hands.

“Well, the chosen few will know what I mean by the Rainbow Road,” he continued. “We’re on that motherfucking Rainbow Road. One veer off and we plunge into space, the black void, and that’s that. So I can’t afford a single mishap, I don’t care what happens. We need to synthesise, synergise, synchronise. You hear me?”

Every week, the boss delivered a near-identical speech; the only thing that changed was the arbitrary cultural reference he dragged up, presumably from the stacks of CDs and video-games in his son’s bedroom.

At this point, the assistant stood up hastily. She was young for the job, a high achiever, reaching for those virtual stars in a pair of vicious heels.

“What we mean,” she said, trying to clarify, “is it’s important not to underestimate green shoots. Those little signs of growth. Shares in petroleum, in plastic, are rising nicely. Not to mention South American superfood angiosperms, part of a wider move towards elite organic harvests. While the economy flounders around us, clinging to the small things is what will help us reach that upward surge.”

“Thank you, Heidi.” The boss shot her an appreciative leer. “Now what the fuck is an angiosperm?”

On his lunch-break, Brian ate a sad desk sandwich with a fellow number-cruncher. The two of them were the runts of the litter, the ones that never got invited to the cloying, marathon lunches the boss often dragged the office out on. This meant they were never in line for promotion, but bore the advantage of letting them avoid the poisonous oysters and chardonnay which often left their colleagues retching all afternoon.

“You know Liam,” Brian mused, “I found a green shoot in my sink the other day. It’s still there, even though I thought I pulled it out.”

“What?” Liam was dim-witted and this was maybe why he never got called out to lunch.

“Like, an actual green shoot. I think it’s getting taller.”

“Maybe God’s trying to tell you something,” Liam said ominously.

Back home that evening, Brian found that the shoot had gotten much taller indeed. So tall that various branches curled out thirstily, wrapping themselves round the taps. Brian shrugged and didn’t bother brushing his teeth that night. He pressed himself into Miriam’s back but realised she was already asleep. It was what, nine o’clock?

He got up very early and left the flat straight away to get to work. The accounts were flying off his desk that morning.

“Good work Ben,” his boss said, floating past the desk, collecting his documents.

“I’m on the upward surge,” Brian nodded.

On his way out the door that night he gave Heidi a contrived and lustful glance. She looked at him with eyebrows raised, but this could mean anything. He decided to drive out to the spot where yesterday he’d seen the flames. It was a pit in the ground, a charred patch of grass gone black. He fancied there was some resemblance to a pie chart, the way the different shades of burnt matter lay, wedge-like, in the circle. He did some rearranging, moving shrivelled plastic and ash and wood chips around until they met satisfactory dimensions.

When he came home with soot all over his hands and face, Miriam said he looked beautiful. She was a Leo and had a thing for fire. He looked into her eyes for the first time in weeks. Her whole body seemed to pause, to start melting right in front of him. The light from the kitchen window made her skin so pale, except for a flash of orange across her face. He was about to kiss her, to fall into the molten mass of her body, when she reached straight for his belt buckle. This was a first.

Afterwards, he went into the bathroom to wash his face. The tree had taken over the entire bathroom. In just a few hours, the little green stems had become proper woven wooden branches. He had to climb over and around them just to take a piss. What came out of him was yellow, dark. The flames were inside him now, and the leaves of the tree shimmered around his body, bathing him in luxurious gold.

“Honey,” he heard Miriam’s voice at the door, glistening with the shrapnel of Heidi’s lisp. He realised he was still clutching his limp penis. “D’you think the world’s ending?”

Today and tomorrow will be dedicated to the work of a young Glaswegian poet, Maria Sledmere. In today’s piece, ‘Zelda’, Maria pays homage to Zelda Fitzgerald, American expat in Paris and often overlooked writer and artist.

Confined to the bedroom, he saw every afternoon as a potential adventure.

“Nathan,” his mother would harp at him as they sat by the television, eating their lunch, “I hope you spend the rest of the day on something productive.”

“Yes,” he’d reply, stonily, trying to glean taste from another cheese sandwich, ignoring the dramatic mundanity of another episode of Doctors.

“Like doing your homework.”

What’s the point?

“I would like to see your homework done,” she’d add again, in perfect monotone, popping the last piece of rye neatly in her painted mouth. Then off to work she’d go, walking the neighbourhood dogs in her leopard print coat. She’d be gone till six; it took that long to return them one by one, Alsatian, labrador after labrador, pug, schnauzer, dachshund.

She kept the leads, all seven of them, hung up on a peg by the door. More than once, Nathan…